Dredging up the Past is the most recent body of paintings by leading Australian artist Richard Bell and continues his ongoing campaign of focusing attention upon the disempowerment of Indigenous Australian peoples. Employing the visual tropes of canonical painting of the twentieth century, Bell appropriates all that is familiar within the modern Western tradition of art, yet subverts the vernacular to raise crucial issues around unceded Aboriginal sovereignty.

Many of the works within Dredging up the Past are imbued with the same irreverent humour Bell is renowned for, yet there is also evident a more direct sense of political urgency disentangled from his typical subversive wit. The exhibition could potentially be interpreted as more mature, indeed, more serious in its narrative delivery than other works, unhinged from satire, yet still with the same anger that is the pervasive thrust of his work both as an activist and artist. At times totemic in scale, the paintings demand our attention, and convey, in no uncertain terms, some strategies toward a more equitable cultural realignment.